Considering that the music companies would love nothing better than to have a locked down, you are completely renting it, means for digital distribution- they just realized that the bulk of their customers won't put up with it. If they thought for a moment that they could get away with some new DRM means, the un-DRMed music would vanish in a puff of smoke.

Don't for one second think that the battle is "won" over DRM in the music space.

No, it's not "won" and if this new initiative takes hold, you can bet the music industry will try to climb aboard. I suspect, however, it will go about as well as "music DVDs" did and will ultimately go nowhere because DRM free music is now the norm... there is no reason for people to want to change now.

In an ideal world, we would have the video industrialists take note of what happened in the audio industry and learn from it. They haven't and it seems they won't. Sad really. They could really prevent t

"But the effort still has a long way to go before it can claim anything like success. The proof will be whether it revives home entertainment sales by getting consumers excited about the new freedoms of the digital world."

Really? New Freedoms? What crack are these people smoking? How delusional have they become? People rip these things of the disks because of the stranglehold these studios are attempting to put there. Once ripped, they can play them when and wherever they way. They already overcharge for content. Once it's digital the costs to the manufacturer drop and profit soars yet the consumer doesn't see any of that. We're still paying $10 bucks for a CD (sans the CD) how many years later?

People see the 'value' of an Audio CD or a movie and they know they are overpriced. The digital forms of that just enforce that opinion.

The whole economics of today seems like it's paying only for exorbitant CEO profits and studio whoring.

What worries me is not so much the attempted sale of "DECE enabled" media, people are entitled to their stupid ideas; but what this will mean for hardware.

If the idea of DECE is to have magic-interoperable DRM, than it is clear that they intend to extend this DRM to as many devices and platforms as possible. From the perspective of a DRM system, this is a terrible idea. All it takes is one manufacturer to fuck up on one device model, and the precious "content" is back in the clear.

However, from the perspective of a customer who wants to be able to repurpose/modify/extend/otherwise enjoy free use of his devices, this is a potential disaster. In pretty much all cases, DRM consortia work as follows:

1. Design a DRM scheme, include some "hook IP" that is necessary to implement the scheme; but copyrighted or otherwise legally protected.

2. Force anybody who wishes to implement the scheme, as a condition of licencing the "hook IP" to agree to certain terms and conditions, including "platform robustness" requirements, in the attempt to prevent the one-weak-implementation-leaks-everything problem.

That's the issue. If this takes off, virtually every common consumer device that happens to touch media in any significant way(set top boxes, media players, multifunction routers, PMPs, etc, etc, etc.) will be produced subject to "platform robustness" requirements. Goodbye third-party-firmware development.

Obviously, there will still be some hacking here and there, they can't stop that; but it could easily be the kiss of death for the vibrant, productive, (and legal) hacking and extension communities like OpenWRT and rockbox. You'll still be able to get a cracked firmware(if you have a hardware revision 4353 manufactured on week 567 and know which warez group to ask around in, so the DRM won't actually stop anything); but being easily able to modify your own devices, even for perfectly legal and legitimate ends, could well end up being a casualty.

Au contraire, experience with game consoles suggests the opposite: hardware hackers wanting to run their own firmware will still do so (and with complex systems like these there will be holes), and then people who want to work around the DRM will piggyback on their efforts. The most notable difference will be that the latter will be those wanting to freely use their media (since people who just want to get free movies will just download them from the internet as they do today, sans DRM), while >90% of pe

>90% of people using homebrew hacks to bypass console copy protection are in it for the warez games

Oh really? I'd love to see some backup for that claim. The Wii's shitty, underengineered DVD-rom drive has a pretty high failure rate (seen 4 of 10 blow out so far, counting friends/family who purchased the thing). Nintendo will charge you ~$100 (after shipping) to get it repaired, or you can go buy a new one (and then go through the hassle of trying to transfer your account and downloads).

Alternatively, a USB hard drive (as low as $25 depending on size) and simple tools can let you rip your discs to a hard drive, preventatively. This then gives you the awesome benefits of:#1 - reducing wear and tear on your DVD drive.#2 - reducing wear and tear on the discs themselves (especially nasty with the grabby slot-loader mechanism).#3 - reducing load times on the games.#4 - Being able to switch games without having to either (a) go to the locked cabinet to get the next one and put this one back or (b) figure out where your toddler hid the disc you want.

I for one can't see a downside to setting this up. $25 of preventative maintenance/upgrading is SO worth it.

You mean it still can't run warez and it can't run unlimited homebrew with access to all the hardware. Other OS mode offers a quite reasonable subset that keeps a sizable proportion of the homebrew community happy. Except on the newer PS3 Slim, and my bet is Sony's move to ditch Other OS will get their full OS hacked sooner now.

Navigate expensive confusing forest of legal media that just might play in your player without locking up every few seconds if it isn't installing a trojan, or downgraded video quality or download faster, cheaper, safer, illegal copy online......you decide!

But seriously, when will they realize they're competing with free, and that means added value, not subtracted?

Want to give me added value? REMOVE ALL THE CRAP IN FRONT OF THE MOVIE!. It's the #1 reason I rip every DVD and BluRay I buy. To remove all the useless crap from the DVD and extract just the movie.

Yes I'm wierd thast I dont instantly watch a DVD that I buy, some sit for a month before I'll watch it, but I dont want to waste my limited time in front of the screen watching a "you evil pirate", buy this , look at this upcoming TV show, etc... crap....

I don't think It's supply and demand. It's price anchoring. People are used to paying $10 so that's what they continue to think it's worth. If the price were set at $2 for a CD sales would initially jump because people would see it as a deal since it's well below the established anchor but eventually they'd adjust to the new anchor and internally value a CD at $2. Then if you tried to charge $10 for a CD you'd have next to zero sales because it's ridiculously higher than what people think a CD is worth. This has nothing to do with supply or demand. It has everything to do with how people's brains work.

Think about it like this: the $599 for an iPhone or a Droid is arbitrary. It was a price point generated by market research that takes irrational agents into account (because as much as economics majors want to pretend we're all rational, we're most definitely not). Now when you see you can get a Droid or iPhone for $199 it feels like a good deal. But only because the original price was set as an anchor. If the original price had been $199 you wouldn't think it's a steal at $199 but because of the early arbitrary price (early adopters are almost always price insensitive) now $199 feels like a good purchasing decision. This is done ALL THE TIME by manufacturers and retailers. Why do you think there are such things as MSRP?

It works everywhere. Studies even show adding a few high priced items to a menu increases sales of ALL items on the menu. People perceive a deal based on relative prices arbitrarily, supply and demand be damned.

That is supply and demand. The motives for people buying the goods at a given price is irrelevant - it could be mind control from the planet Zog , it makes no difference. The fact that they are willing to do so is all that matters.

That is supply and demand. The motives for people buying the goods at a given price is irrelevant - it could be mind control from the planet Zog , it makes no difference. The fact that they are willing to do so is all that matters.

Well, that's demand anyway. The idea of "Supply and Demand" is that prices fluctuate based on shifts in either. But MP3s on Amazon or iTunes are in unlimited supply so according to supply and demand the price for them (regardless of demand) should approach $0.

I'm not suggesting that supply and demand don't factor into real world prices of physical products. But I am suggesting that the reason buying an MP3/AAC "album" on iTunes/Amazon is still priced close to the same cost as buying the physical CD *and* wh

Under normal circumstances, yes. "Intellectual property" screws that idea all up though. Supply and demand don't work when supply is infinite. Prices are only set by demand, but that too gets screwed up when people find a way to access the unlimited supply for zero cost.

Record companies EXPECT people to pay the prices they set. Some will, many (who still want the product - just not as that asking price) won't. You can argue about "THAT'S STEALING!!!" all you want, but the population as a whole just doesn't see it that way. Supply and demand simple doesn't apply to this model.

Imagine you saw the Playstation 3 when it came out. You want one, but realistically you couldn't pay the $400+ price tag. A genie visits you and tells you that if you press this red button a Playstation 3 will magically appear. It doesn't disappear off some store shelf, it doesn't take one from someone else to make yours, it literally appears for free out of thin air. The only "cost" to anyone is that you will no longer buy it from Sony. Do you honestly think most people would feel it morally wrong to take the Playstation out of thin air? Nope - and no amount of bickering from Sony will change that.

With digital goods we have that magic red button. People were fooled for a while when they felt like they were buying physical albums and movies on a hard-media, but that trick is going away. They're not getting the genie back into the bottle. Even as an iTunes user I'll admit that my purchases there are about the convenience of having everything easily searchable and of a known quality. Not having to deal with shady torrent sites, spending hours looking for something, and then discovering that it's a bad rip, fake, etc, it more than worth $0.99 per song to me. However I'm paying for that convenience, NOT out of some weird moral calling. The companies need to learn to work that angle. Give me a product that WORKS - and works everywhere - with a price that's high enough to make a profit but still low enough that it's worth it to people to get it this way rather than resorting to the back alley ways. Price it too high or bog it down with DRM and I have absolutely no issue going back to getting my music and/or movies via P2P.

This sonuds like a good reason why I would want to pirate things rather than buy them. Already the issues with the stupid software DRM that's prevalent all over the place encourage people to either pirate the software or find a crack so that they don't have to deal with it.

When I get a new DVD, it spends about 15mn outside its box (the time it takes to rip it), then goes back in never to see daylight again. I then watch the content on my HTPC running XBMC. Same goes for music.

The day I can't rip a DVD (or a CD for that matter) is the day I'll stop buying them.

I actually did stop buying a few years ago. Don't pirate either. I am just disgusted with the piss poor quality of the vast majority of the media out there. I get more entertainment value from sharing pictures of kittens saying "I can haz cheezburger?" with my girlfriend. It is not worth my time to watch most movies, much less buy or download them.

I have yet to find a ripper that does everything you'd need to remaster the disk. I'd love to have a ripper that creates a DVD Studio Pro project containing all the assets, including the menus and buttons and links and chapter marks and scripts. Then one can intelligently edit the project to remove the parts you don't want, including removing the buttons leading to them, use an image editor to airbrush out the button, expose and preserve all the easter eggs, and finally remaster them all to your preferred s

In the past: a slastdot post with "i'm too lazy to find this link, someone else can post it" is an automatic -1Now: a slastdot post with "i'm too lazy to find this XKCD link, someone else can post it" is an automatic +5

It's not just stupid DRM, but stupid content controls in general. An example. I wanted to watch Inglorious Bastards so I checked the Xbox marketplace. I see it's available, but wait it's only available to buy - in standard definition no less. Why I can't I rent it? There are tons of other movies to rent. It can be rented at the video store or on netflix, but I can't rent it from the Xbox marketplace. I am trying to pay to rent a movie, and the content providers instead of making it easy for me to do so push me to find it on the internet instead.

You're right, the selection isn't great but it's okay for wanting to watch something right now. The last thing I want to do is drive to a brick and mortar store. Netflix also doesn't have it for streaming so that's a no go.

I see it's available, but wait it's only available to buy - in standard definition no less. Why I can't I rent it?

I like amazon's music store because they provide actual mp3s. However, I ran into this exact problem with TiVo and Amazon's downloadable movie partnership. As of a couple of years ago when I last tried, many of the movies I wanted to watch either weren't available for download, or were only available for purchase - not rental. It didn't make any sense at all, and was quite frustrating. I want to pay $2.99 to watch a movie once. Not $14.99. So instead, they got neither.

Well, if you can feel "fair"... Several boxes with games I bought collect dust on the shelf, while I play torrented versions. Not gonna risk putting these in my drive. It took me weeks to get my DVD-RW working fully again after SecuROM bundled with Oblivion broke the drivers beyond repair and I couldn't even make copies of my private data.

Polish standard edition does.It did protest that I have Alcohol 120% installed.After removing it, it installed, but nobody but me could read content of DVD disks I burned since then. (...maybe, just maybe it was a spindle of really crappy disks, and a coincidence, but *shrug*...)

StarForce can break some drives/hardware/, parent had SecuROM break/software/ (drivers). I've never heard of this before, but I believe it inserts itself as a CD driver to prevent some things, so a small bug could easily ruin a driver stack and require a reinstall.

One of the many dangers of trusting legal, properly licensed software. Kind of sad that you can trust scene hackers more than legit content providers; I've found trojans in both but the former is by far cleaner.

Rather than looking for new and better ways to make money, they would rather do their damnedest to try to prop up their old ways of doing things, doing vast quantities of damage unto themselves and the consumers- and in the end, capitulating and finding a way to make good money in the new scheme of things.

They did it with VCRs and audio cassettes.

They can do it with digital distribution- they've just got to quit trying to control things the way they're used to. It no longer works well and they can't figure out they've got to change, right along with their customer base.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to know what’s inside,” he said. “They should just know it will play.”

Yeah. Except when it doesn't. No internet connection? No movie for you. Rights locker company hit by power failure? No movies for anyone.If I "buy" a movie, I expect it to play whenever and wherever I want to watch it...in an airplane, on a boat or in a cave; and without the requirement for internet connectivity or an external "permission" server. I'm fine with those constraints if I'm renting a movie online, but purchase, at a higher price, should mean reduced restrictions on transport and use, in addition to the rights to play multiple times.

And let's not even think about the "oops, we have decided to discontinue this DRM scheme in favor of a new, incompatible one" scenario, which obsoletes your player and movie collection.

Yeah. Except when it doesn't. No internet connection? No movie for you. Rights locker company hit by power failure? No movies for anyone.

You also forgot...

Rights locker company files for bankruptcyRights locker company decides to stop supporting this specific DRM scheme (like PlaysForSure)Rights locker company upgrading the DRM to DECEv2Someone hacks the device you're using and they decide to revoke keys in devices without a hardware upgradeThe movie studio decides that 'buying' a movie means you only get to play it an arbitrary number of times

Annnnnnd one more: first sale doctrine and right of resale, as it applies to all things I buy, is damaged in cases of any software or game that requires "activation." That is why I purchase absolutely nothing that requires "activation." They don't consider it a real purchase, so I won't consider it either. Many DRM schemes fail in this manner as well.

Going deeper into the copyright wars... The legal concept of copyright is that the holder gains exclusivity of copying for a limited time. If they attempt to limit copying permanently and forever, technologically, via DRM or other bastardizations of digital information, then they, first and foremost, have made that information something outside of the definition of copyrighted material.

The advent of widespread digital copying and distributing capabilities among the regular population has set many in the content production industries into a frenzy of attempting to fight the new reality. Nothing has changed about right and wrong. If you tell me a joke today, I am 100% free to tell that joke to someone else; such is the nature of information. Now that it has scaled up, some business models can either change, or some very large businesses can continue to fight a losing battle with their legal teams, lobbyists, senators, etc... at great expense, gaining nothing but extreme distrust and disdain from a growing segment of the population.

The amount of software I have a "cracked" version of running on my PC coincides in a scary manner (>85%) with the amount of software I have discs for sitting on my shelf.

The remainder I have either (a) lost the disc for or (b) had the floppy go bad.

Why so many of them cracked? In the case of games, so I don't have to get out the disc and use the DVD drive as a fucking 5 1/4" dongle just to play all the content that's been loaded to my hard drive anyways. In the case of the software, so I can disable the neverending stream of "UPDATE ME UPDATE ME UPDATE ME" crap and just use the software for what I need it for.

And don't tell me it really constantly needs to check for updates. It's phoning home just to fucking phone home.

They turn around and do this with "digital media" files, I don't bother with them any more. "Rights locker" my ass.

It's glaringly obvious that this concept is already doomed to fail. So, what incentive do consumers have to buy this new hardware? This hardware is not going to be cheap, and no one will be willing to pay huge subsidies to make it attractive to customers. And what real value does this add for the customer, compared to another DRM free device that plays everything, say.... a cheap laptop with HDMI output. Oh, and it plays all movies, except from Disney.

The movie and TV companies need to take advantage of their huge catalog. If downloads were cheap (say $20 for a certain 20h of content), DRM free, and access to ALL movies and TV shows ever made, I would sign up in a heart-beat. Additional value can be added by a netflix type rating and recommendation system, and channels which are pre-programmed. The key is to add additional value on top of the content itself, which piracy has pretty much pushed down to almost 0.

This is nothing new. Back in the 80s and games on 5.25" floppy disk, I bought my games (hardly anyone did, despite copy protection systems), but I would not buy any game unless it either didn't have copy protection (there was hardly any such thing) or I could get a copy with the copy protection broken.

EVERY time I bought a game, I wrote to the company telling them that I would have bought the title sooner, but I refused to buy anything with copy protection on it, and I had to wait until I could find a crac

As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment

My ideal these days would be to just buy a license (and I use the term deliberately) and for them to store the content in their cloud and for me (in a Steam type way) to then be able to activate that content on my various different devices. If I could get rid of all my DVDs and have a single, secure,

My ideal these days would be to just buy a license (and I use the term deliberately) and for them to store the content in their cloud and for me (in a Steam type way) to then be able to activate that content on my various different devices.

You don't really want this because the content providers' notion of their "content" will certainly include stuff like those unskippable ads and other crap that drive you insane. With the content stored "in the could" as you propose, there's likely no way around this ty

I don't want physical copies either. When I get a CD I insert in my laptop and it opens sound juicer and rips it to mp3 so I can play it everywhere. At this point, I have no use for the plastic anymore. But I want DRM even less.

Now in order to get lynched I'm going to start with a statement

I don't care if they put these restrictions on

But I'll add a caveat...

As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment

And what about re-sale? can you sell it to me? can you leave it to your grandchildren? How about:

As long as it can be played on any device I or anyone else owns or may own in the future that supports an open standard?

That pretty much rules out DRM. An open standard is a standard that anyone can implement, with no (significant) barriers to entry. Otherwise the word "open" is just newspeak for closed.

Actually... Steam is worse. There are a large number of games that in addition to the DRM of requiring Steam to play the game you bought, SecureROM titles are showing up and include activation limits.... what BULLSHIT.

Take a look at GTA 4 or Crysis on Steam. Fortunately, Valve is openly stating on the product page that it includes SecureROM, they're not hiding it (yet).

FTA Disney is not participating. Of course it's so they can continue their limited time offers of movies and return them "to the vault" for another 10 years. This would put their movies on the same footing as everyone else's and they've managed to turn the "scarcity" into a marketing tool and sales enhancer.

As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment

I'm sure a lot of people agree with you, but here's the problem. Hollywood to date releases these "digital copies" with DVD purchases so you can play it on your PC, phone, whatever. The dirty little secret is that the digital copies all expire within a few months. So this whole idea requires you to have faith that a group of people who have yet to do the right thing will suddenly do the right thing. I don't see it. My guess is that they will indeed come up with a workable way for the movies to work on

I'll come out and say that I agree with you... in theory. In theory, I wish I could pay a price and then be able to see my purchased movie anywhere. Real-world problems interfere with that ideal, however.

Movie studios won't just put the movie up somewhere where I could get it for free. They'll want to make sure that I'm actually authorized to watch the movie. This means they'll rely on DRM. This, in turn, means they're likely to rely on one location for authorizations to take place. If those authoriza

I don't care if they put these restrictions on...As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment

How can that work? The main concept of DRM is this: "if our algorithm says you didn't buy this, it won't work."

That algorithm is always fallible. Maybe 5 years from now you'll want to use the file on hardware that hasn't been invented yet. Maybe 10 years from now the DRM-verifying server will be shut down. Somehow, sometime, it will bite you. And it will suck. And you will have lost w

But why even bother with "owning" a license? TFA makes a good point when it observes that where the market is really heading is in the direction of streaming video on-demand. It may take some more time to finally get there, particularly for necessary infrastructure build out, but really what we are talking about here is price and convenience. Suppose for example that it costs you $0.99 (or even less with ads for example) for each view of a movie; if it is available in HD streamed to the device of your c

Just imagine old LP Albums having DRM. What company would still support servers to unlock those? Not even whe biggest multi-major-corp commitment would allow me to play records if this kinds of DRM would have been possible 80 years ago.

But the point is still valid. You are referring to natural obsolescence of hardware. He is referring to forced obsolescence.

What if, in addition to building a phonograph cylinder machine to listen to your old cylinders (which is technologically very feasible) you were prevented from actually playing the cylinders because they were protected by a DRM scheme and the DMCA says you can't bypass those, and you can't Edison to sell you a license because the current licenseholder for the DRM technology isn't sel

The difference is that there has to be a revenue stream to support the company. If the DRM becomes obsolete, the revenue stream dries up. As that point it's only a matter of time before your media stops working. ICANN's revenue stream is not at risk, because we have to pay every year to renew our domains, and ICANN gets a cut.

...and lots of big, influential businesses start losing money hand over fist* so Something Gets Done About It very rapidly.

If the central DRM provider goes under then lots of little, uninfluential people** have to buy The Matrix again and lots of big, influential businesses make money hand over fist. Lots of crocodile tears - but all they do is make the champagne taste salty.

*especially true in the case of the porn industry:-)

**who waived any guarantee of lifetime access to their purchases when they

while visiting the in-laws i actually thought about buying some cartoons on iTunes since they don't have a DVR and my son needed his Dora, Oso and Little Einsteins. This is more like an open encryption standard for online purchases than increasing DRM. of course Apple won't support it so anything you buy from itunes will only play on apple hardware/software. for everything else you will just buy a commodity box like a Roku and buy the content from anywhere on the internet and take it with you

Nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice; it's more to prepare you for your first consultation. With that said:

On another note would it be a fair assessment to say that because I pay for X cable/Satellite service that offers these shows I'm somewhat or absolutely entitled to being able to download rips of these episodes from the NET?

Not in a U.S. court of law at least. You aren't necessarily entitled to download a copy of a work to which you otherwise have access. UMG v. MP3.com. But you're free to buy or build a DVR to record them off Nick Jr. though. Sony v. Universal.

DRM only hurts the legitimate customers. The people pirating get around it. The content owners spend millions of dollars (if not more) to create better encryption that is cracked in months and is then obsolete to try and keep pirates from doing their thing (which never works) but the only thing they succeed in doing is pissing off their actual customers.

I was at home for christmas and wanted to watch a Blu-Ray movie on my laptop and output it to my parent's HDTV. Connected up an HDMI cable and PowerDVD 9 said it could only run on the primary display. I disabled the laptop display and tried again; now it said that the display connected was incompatible or some such nonsense (DRM non-compliant). If I had just pirated my movie, I wouldn't have had a problem.

It's easier to not follow the street lights (you get there faster, if at all)

If you don't follow streetlights, you risk getting into a car crash, possibly injuring or killing yourself, other drivers, or even innocent bystanders (e.g. children walking to school) -- all of society loses, including you.
Furthermore, if you run streetlights, you'll probably get pulled over, fined, and maybe even jailed.

It's easier not to care about others (less worries)

If you don't care about others, they are less likely to care about you. If you act like an ass to others, they're more likely to act like an ass towards you -- both parties lose (unless you like being treated like crap).
If everyone in society didn't care about anyone else, then all of society would lose.

So tell me, who do I hurt if I pay once for a CD or DVD, then rip or pirate it and play the unlocked files on any/every device I own? Who do I hurt when I lend my copy to a friend (who, if he finds he likes it, may even purchase his own copy)?

The answer is no one -- the artists and businessmen who made and sold the product were fairly compensated, and I get to enjoy their work. What DRM does is help the businessmen charge me once for each device I want to play it on, and that hurts _me_

The reason why we punish all these things is that we perceive them as unjust. Likewise, under normal circumstances, customers should perceive as unjust that they paid for something while someone pirated it. But in this case, they perceive as more unjust that they have to hoop through additional loops on top of that. It's a cure worse than a disease problem.

Nope, it's your rejoinder that doesn't hold water. If I couldn't pay taxes without special TaxBux [tm], and if I went out and bought some TaxBux and it turned out that they weren't compatible with the IRS office in my state, then you'd have a similar situation.

Also, when was the last time you had to follow the rules to eat a banana? Sure, you bought the banana from someone, and that was following the rules, just like buying a DVD is following the rules. But once you had the banana, you could just eat

DRM only hurts the legitimate customers. The people pirating get around it. The content owners spend millions of dollars (if not more) to create better encryption that is cracked in months and is then obsolete to try and keep pirates from doing their thing (which never works) but the only thing they succeed in doing is pissing off their actual customers.
I was at home for christmas and wanted to watch a Blu-Ray movie on my laptop and output it to my parent's HDTV. Connected up an HDMI cable and PowerDVD 9 said it could only run on the primary display. I disabled the laptop display and tried again; now it said that the display connected was incompatible or some such nonsense (DRM non-compliant). If I had just pirated my movie, I wouldn't have had a problem.

Oddly enough(especially of the PowerDVD 9 software came pre-installed), isn't that the ENTIRE purpose of having a Blu-Ray player in a laptop that also has an HDMI output? To watch movies on an external display? Not that this is your fault of course, but it does bring to light a rather obvious issue, which will likely force me to ask others I know with similar hardware to test it.

I'm also curious if you used a client such as VLC media player instead of PowerDVD? Just wondering if it's something within Pow

Any legal solution, yes. Anyone that has the keys to create software to decrypt BluRay legally has agreed to only output the video over a HDCP-enabled video connection. His parents' TV doesn't support that, so no legal solution would be able to play it on that TV.

The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.

I dislike DRM as much as the next Slashdotter, but this is actually laxer than the current DRM employed on digital content distribution - where you're locked into the device you download it to and the possibility to popping over to a friends house to watch something is minimal.

The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.

If I want to take a movie to a friend's house (see first line of TFA) and play it, all I have to do is stick the.mp4 (or whatever) file on a USB stick and plug it in their player. The only thing that would stop me doing this is DRM.

...so its a new form of DRM which solves a problem that only exists because of DRM.

Now, I'm happy to either (a) pay a small fee to a streaming video-on-demand service to view a film once, (b) pay a reasonable subscription for access to a large media library or (c) pay a significantly larger price to download an unprotected copy in a standard format which I can watch time and again and "treat like a DVD".

It might sound technical, but it could be crucial to persuading consumers to buy all the splashy new Internet-connected gear that tech companies will demonstrate at C.E.S., like HDTVs and set-top boxes that can download TV shows and films.

I have a set-top box which can download TV and films. It's a Windows PC with a BitTorrent client. No doubt there are other solutions, but mine works without DRM.

It might sound technical, but it could be crucial to persuading consumers to buy all the splashy new Internet-connected gear that tech companies will demonstrate at C.E.S., like HDTVs and set-top boxes that can download TV shows and films.

I have a set-top box which can download TV and films. It's a Windows PC with a BitTorrent client. No doubt there are other solutions, but mine works without DRM.

Yes, but the real issue with your solution is you are able to download TV and films sans payment...to just about anyone...ever. Obviously corporations have a bit of an issue staring at a goose egg for this type of revenue, regardless of how much they charge you for the hardware.

Consumers, the industry believes, could balk at buying digital movies and TV shows until they can bring their collections with them wherever they go -- by and large the same freedom people have with DVDs.

In the last year and a half, a broad alliance of high-tech companies and Hollywood studios has been trying to address this problem through an organization called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE. Five of the six major Hollywood studios (Warner Brothers, NBC Universal, Sony, Paramount and Fox, but not Walt Disney) are involved, with Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Intel and Best Buy.

Remember, these difficulties are from them wanting information to behave like limited physical objects. Every step they have to negate information's greatest advantages over physical objects, in order to maintain artificial scarcity. Those who haven't shackled themselves would never need a "broad alliance of high-tech companies and Hollywood studios" to address the problem, since it wouldn't even exist. We already have video encoding standards, and storage medium standards, so we can move video among all our devices. The only problem is that it's too easy. It's insane that their problem is that something is too useful, and they consider crippling the technology to be creating value.

You are attempting to compete against piracy, which can already provide me with the above, by offering me an inferior product at the cost of replacing my existing, fully functional hardware.

I did not purchase music online until Amazon MP3 came to town. Amazon MP3 actually fills my exact requirements, high quality, unencrypted, unencumbered media, and as such I have stopped pirating audio entirely and have instead been purchasing music again. It's worth the money to get a high quality instance of what I actually want, and includes an unexpected high value bonus; the album art in every file!

Amazon MP3 offers a superior product to that produced by piracy. Do the same for video and I will begin spending money on movies again, until that time I will continue to get what I want from the people willing to offer it; pirates.

It was a few years later when the REAL crackdown came. The Listener’s License. What a fantastic concept. I can’t believe it. See it happened like this. There was this - There is all this piracy, see everybody was - Piracy was - Uh, Piracy is now what they now consider a theft. See in order to combat piracy which was getting really rampant, all this information was flowing around nobody really liked that so they wanted it gone. And they wanted to get rid of piracy. But they couldn’t stop it.

The Internet was growing everyday. No one could stem the flow so they created the Listener’s License. Started real easy. See music, legitimate music to purchase, was, you know, say 20 bucks. And then what they did was, if you signed up to get this card, you know like a loyalty program card of the day. You’d get 75% percent off. So a 20 dollar CD became a 5 dollar CD. And you could buy it legitimately. For 20 bucks you would walk out of there with 4 CD’s. Amazing.

Of course people were signing up for it in droves, I mean why wouldn’t ya? You could go buy a pirate CD for 6 bucks or you could buy the reall thing for 5. Consumers are such mercenaries. So they signed up en masse.

2 years went by, 2 years. Then it became mandatory. See if you didn’t have your listener’s license, if you couldn’t present your card, well you weren’t able to buy music. Part of the licensing agreement came when you got the card. And all of sudden people were out in the cold.

But it wasn’t just the music you know. The Listener’s License was created by the conglomerates. They all got together. If you wanted to see a movie, hey if you had your listener’s License you could get in for 2 dollars. (chuckle) 2 bucks. Oh you don’t have a Listener’s License, well you can’t get in. See they couldn’t control the piracy so they stopped it at its source.

If ever you were found to be a pirate or if your computer was ever found to have MP3’s that weren’t appropriate on it you were eliminated, your listener’s License was revoked and you were out of the loop. It's all private enterprise, you don’t have a right to music, you never had a right to it. It's all private.

No more movies no more shows. Can’t even buy art. Cause you can scan it. What if you scanned that picture? So, regulation of course is always the first step to total domination. But we didn’t see that either. We weren’t ready for the horror.

At that time the Listener’s License had huge power. Not the power it has today, I mean now. If you do not have a valid Listener’s License. I mean - well in our time you can’t do anything, I mean, you’re a pirate. If you can’t present, that is part of your paperwork. It’s part of your identification. See the listener’s License, after they came out with that. That was a huge step one.

But everyone was so focused on the Listener’s License they didn’t see where the REAL power play was made. See everyone was so whipped up, and the media again, you know the corporately controlled media. Got everyone focusing on the benefits and the drawbacks, a big debate over the listener’s license. But then what they didn’t see was, was the regulations that went into play on the recording equipment. See that was the one that really came back. They started putting these standards on microphones and any kind of recording media. You wanted to record, well you gotta adhere to this standard. Because this is the future. Got to make sure the quality is there.

Ok, I'll bite. What the heck is all-hardware encryption? Granted, I'm sure it's possible to implement decryption algorithms in silicon, instead of as software, but what's to prevent some enterprising programmer from creating a *software* implementation of the decryption algo? How can you *force* encryption/decryption to be all-hardware?

Hardware is often easier to make resistant to reverse engineering. For example, one way to get the secret keys from software is just to look at it in a hex editor or dis-assembly. This isn't easy, don't get me wrong, but it's a lot easier than using a SEM and a tiny drill to open a smartcard without setting off the self destruct. And if you screw up, you don't need to buy a new one to try again.

It also lets you close the screencap hole: with a cracked OS you can just capture everything that appears. Now if

So I rented "The Hangover" last night. There is a nice new nasty FBI warning when you load the disk and it won't let you skip the previews or go to the main menu. It was another nail in the coffin for me an purchasing or renting movies. I'm about one more bad experience away from becoming a full blown pirate. What made DVD's great when they first came out was the ability to skip all the crap and to not have to rewind, this forcing you to watch PSA's before the movie is utter crap. (Yes there is a stop smoking PSA you can't skip too...)

It still wouldn't work. How much torrents are telesyncs, or from other sources that automatically bypass anything on BluRay or DVD. BlueRay rips are available almost same day as release anyway regardless of being better protected than CSS.

Or if anyone is too lazy to read between the lines, this will only result in masses of pirated DVDs come out of China, where most of the designs being sold by Chinese "IC design" companies are actually stolen from someone else; either they were involved in the design and stole it, or it's a microscope-scanned product. When I worked for Silicon Engineering, they'd just had a current chip design stolen by some Chinese fuckers who were running them off by the thousand. The Chinese probably have more experience

All I ever wanted was to buy the LICENCE to the content which is what I'm really paying for and nevermind about how I get a copy. I want to sign up somewhere that I have a lifetime personal use licence to say, The Matrix.

You really want to enter into a license agreement with Hollywood? That's like accepting net points on a movie production; it's just asking to be cheated. Let's say you get your lifetime personal use license to "The Matrix". Well, you've got the license, but if you actually want to play i

If the price of all food except for white rice was set (arbitrarily) at $5,000/oz. would that be ok? I mean, it would be your fault if you paid for anything besides white rice. People should not have to do without things they want in order to eliminate corruption. That some do is noble, and laudable besides. But it doesn't mean it's ok for practices to continue, just because not all people choose the same of the two evils.